Abstract
ABSTRACTPrevious research has found that individuals vary greatly in emotion differentiation, that is, the extent to which they distinguish between different emotions when reporting on their own feelings. Building on previous work that has shown that emotion differentiation is associated with individual differences in intrapersonal functions, the current study asks whether emotion differentiation is also related to interpersonal skills. Specifically, we examined whether individuals who are high in emotion differentiation would be more accurate in recognising others’ emotional expressions. We report two studies in which we used an established paradigm tapping negative emotion differentiation and several emotion recognition tasks. In Study 1 (N = 363), we found that individuals high in emotion differentiation were more accurate in recognising others’ emotional facial expressions. Study 2 (N = 217), replicated this finding using emotion recognition tasks with varying amounts of emotional information. These findings suggest that the knowledge we use to understand our own emotional experience also helps us understand the emotions of others.
Highlights
Inferring emotions from others is an important component of social life
Emotion differentiation (ED) To examine whether the performance on the ED task was related with verbal intelligence, we calculated the correlation of ED with the verbal IQ test and found a small, but significant positive association, rp = .118, 95%, CI [.013, .231], p < .05, indicating that people who score high on verbal IQ tend to score higher on the ED test as well
In order to examine whether the effect we found in Study 1 was merely due to the nature of the stimuli, we included another ER task, the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test (GERT), which uses different channels of nonverbal expressions
Summary
Inferring emotions from others is an important component of social life. Beyond merely inferring that something is wrong, knowing that the other is sad rather than angry or afraid enables us to engage in social interactions that are tailored to the other’s specific emotional state. People high in emotion differentiation use emotion categories like ‘sad’ and ‘worry’ to differentiate how they feel in different emotional situations. The importance of emotion differentiation for one’s well-being has been shown across multiple studies in which a relation between emotion differentiation and psychopathology has been demonstrated (Barrett et al, 2001; Emery, Simons, Clarke, & Gaher, 2014; Erbas et al, 2014; Suvak et al, 2011). The overarching explanation for these findings is that the more people are able to make fine-grained distinctions between emotions by the use of different words across situations, the more they are aware of their emotional reactions, and the more they are able to adapt and to regulate their emotions (see Erbas et al, in press; Kashdan et al, 2015, for reviews). The relationship between emotion differentiation and intrapersonal functioning is well-established, it is still an open question to what extent emotion differentiation relates to a person’s interpersonal emotion skills
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